


look back, but don't stare

by SerpaSas



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alcoholics Anonymous, Gen, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-04-23 20:24:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14340243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerpaSas/pseuds/SerpaSas
Summary: Doug dies, and four days later a man with a too wide smile and a voice sweet like antifreeze comes to Kate’s door and tells her Goddard fuckin’ Futuristics has selected Anne to be the recipient of their Goddard Futuristics’ Charitable Grant For Children Disabled Due to Addiction that, should they accept it, would pay any and all bills attached to Anne’s injuries, disabilities, and/or trauma from the Drunk Driving Car Accident.Kate’s first though is:damn, Doug, you went and sold all your organs or some shit as a stupid apology, didn't you?





	1. before

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is a thing I wrote. Fun fact about me, I was raised in AA, which is a little bit like being raised in some obscure religion: it has its own holidays/celebrations, traditions, prayers, bible, rules to live by- you even get a new birthday. All of which is to say Kate, as I've written her, is a mashup of about a dozen women I grew up around. Also, I do hope that all of the lingo and references are common knowledge enough that it makes sense.

Doug dies, and four days later a man with a too wide smile and a voice sweet like antifreeze comes to Kate’s door and tells her Goddard fuckin’ Futuristics has selected Anne to be the recipient of their Goddard Futuristics’ Charitable Grant For Children Disabled Due to Addiction that, should they accept it, would pay any and all bills attached to Anne’s injuries, disabilities, and/or trauma from the Drunk Driving Car Accident. The poison that must be under the sweet of antifreeze shows more, when he says _Drunk Driving_.

Kate’s first though is: _damn, Doug, you went and sold all your organs or some shit as a stupid apology, just getting us mixed up with some shady shit, didn’t you, you stupid loving bastard?_ Because that was fuckin’ Doug’s problem all over, that he loved too much and got stupid on it, and then let his stupid hurt the same exact people he loved. It’s the exact same stupid that got Anne in that accident, just liquor soaked to boot- he loved Anne too fuckin’ much to lose her, something Kate would have been able to predict if she hadn’t been so preoccupied with every stupid fuckin’ thing they’d done before Anne, every fucked up story they told about their drinking days, some turned for a laugh, others- or the same- turned for warning.

And here’s the thing about Kate: she is an alcoholic ( _Hi Kate_ ). She’s terrified one day, a doctor examining Anne’s progress and finding it slow will look at her and ask _did you drink during pregnancy?_ because she drank hard in the first two months before she took a test and was too scared by what full on DTs would do to a fetus and too broke to go to medical detox so she did longer weening process. She goes to meeting at least once a week without fail. She sits in the dusty church basement her group rents and drinks the shitty coffee she pitches quarters into a hat to help buy, and she eats the cookies old-timers and people trying to quit smoking bring in. She recites the Serenity prayer when she swore she’d never pray again, and she doesn’t break that oath because a power greater than herself doesn’t have to mean God. She listens to story after story and watches as people who are scammers and liars with or without their vice spin their stories and try their tricks, with and without success. She smokes outside with the others and chases off dealers looking for easy prey. She was in love with Douglas Eiffel from practically childhood, may still be in love with him a bit even now because he’s still half of where her daughter came from, because sometimes people are so integral to your life story they become some deep part of you, sunk into your marrow.

All that to say, Kate knows a liar and a scammer a mile away, and Mr. Suit-and-tie-and-sharp-smile is one. But the thing is-

The thing is. 

They have a pile of bills taller than Anne less than a year out from the accident, every sum mind-shattering and life shattering, and Kate had to take time off to care for Anne at first and had to get a new job when she got fired for not working on top of the extra jobs she had to pick up to make up for the time without pay, and even though Anne’s become less and less afraid of her new world Kate barely has the brain space to remember how to do her jobs, never mind learn ASL, to the point where she’s been seriously considering begging her parents or hell, Doug’s mom, to let them move in with them because they might be terrible options, all of them, but damn it, if Kate drops dead from exhaustion Anne’ll just end up with them anyways and without a shield, and-

And and and. Kate is tired, and doesn’t have much of a choice. She says yes.

 

.

 

Kate reconsiders her initial impression that Doug had sold every single organ he had, committing the weirdest suicide ever in the process, within the first week of Goddard’s grant. They pay every single bill by the morning after Mr. Cutter visited, have compensated Kate for the time she wasn’t working and sent an email with dates and times of ASL classes that she will also be compensated for, and scheduled an appointment for Anne to be assessed and, if possible, fit for hearing aids or implants. The doctors had said neither would be possible to restore Anne’s hearing, but if anyone had figured out a way, it was Goddard. 

That seemed impossibly generous, even for a company as rich as Goddard, and the fact that someone as seemingly high up the food chain as Cutter took personal control of the whole thing and flew her and Anne out to Florida made it even weirder. One weird guy who’d started coming to meetings when Anne was was a baby who only made it a couple months before he relapsed used to say that on the black market, and entire human body was worth $550K. All of this, and the promise that it was going to last ‘as long as it takes to get Anne and you settled’ surpasses even that.

What the _hell_ did Doug do now? Did he fake his death and sell his admittedly highly talented (when he’s sober and trying) radio skills to Goddard or some rival company, an act they’ve responded to by planning to put explosives in her daughter’s head?

Has Kate been drinking too much coffee? Almost certainly, yes.

She’s still relieved when the (non-invasive, and she watches like a hawk) tests reveal they don’t currently have even experimental tech that could give Anne her hearing back, which, admittedly, is the opposite of what she expected to feel at that news, so. Bonus.

Marcus’s (she started using his first name unasked when he used hers unasked) unnerving smile is gone, when it’s all finished with. It only serves to demonstrate how dead his eyes are- less like a shark and more like one of the hyper realistic porcelain dolls Anne’s grandmother (not Kate’s mamá, not even her mother; those hurts go too deep, both ways, and you can only Step 9 so hard, you know?) gives her. It’s probably why he normally smiles like an axe murderer- it definitely distracts.

“Kate, please know that we still have _many_ projects in progress. We could have a working prototype in a few months, even!” His smile slowly splits his face, and if Kate hadn’t dealt with some genuine psychopaths back in the day, and a bunch of pretty sketch guys in the program, she’d probably feel some degree of threatened. This dude had nothing on Creepy Larry or Tall Dave, though. He didn’t show up peering through her kitchen window in the middle of the night, or if he did, he had the consideration not to get caught, _Dave_.

His dead doll eyes drifted away from her, over and behind her shoulder to where the med-tech nerds were, and his voice grew pointed. “Won’t. We.”

Several voices rushed to assure her they were close, suuuuper close, closer than they ever had been before.

“That is how time allegedly works,” someone said from the hallway, popping his head in like he was about to say a passing ‘hello’ to some co-workers he was friendly with, or, with the quip and the way he moved like he knew how to duck and roll at a moment’s notice, just co-workers he enjoyed batting at like a cat with a dangling toy. Then his gaze caught on Marcus and his expression froze, smile turning into a grimace. “Mr. Cutter, sir, I didn’t know you were down here-“ he cut himself off for a split second as he caught sight of Anne before saying in bemusement, “With a small child?”

“Mr. Jacobi, we can’t stand around all day. Mr. Cutter, sir.” Another man reeking of military came up behind the first man, catching his shoulder and dragging as he gave a sharp nod to Marcus.

“Sir, why does Cutter have a small child? It that his child?” Mr. Jacobi asked, beseechingly. 

“You’re not that stupid, Daniel.” Military replied.

Kate looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at Kate. She raised one eyebrow. The med-techs cowered.

“Well,” Marcus said finally, “That’s enough for today, don’t you think?”

 

.

 

There’s not much more sketch stuff after that, besides feeling sometimes like she’s with the weirdest, most absent, non-committal sugar daddy of all time. Goddard keeps paying whatever she submits, and sometimes things she doesn’t, which get waved off by Marcus the first and only time she mentions during his yearly visit.

“Oh, that’s what we get, having AIs do all billing for you. They just do the darnedest things!” He says, grinning all the while. He was definitely lying, although there’s little body language and still nothing in his doll eyes. If she hadn’t spent almost five years talking the best liars down from slipping while they insisted all the while they weren’t about to down a bottle of jack or pills and lose however many chips they had to not catch a lie when she heard it. But money was money, and the next year she was too broke- car, fridge, and dryer all dying in a week, because they always come in threes- to even consider bringing it up.

But just a month after that visit, near the end of March, two tickets to Florida show up in her email, bought and paid for.

She calls the number Marcus gave her that very first visit that she’s never used. “Why do I have two tickets to come visit in a week?”

Marcus laughs. “Oh, Kate, I’m so sorry- I meant to call you before those tickets got purchased!” He lies, “The day just got away from me. So much happening around here, it’s all very exciting! But I’ve been assured by our best mind in the whole of Goddard Futuristics that she’s developed a little something to restore Anne’s hearing! Isn’t that wonderful?”

That’s the question, isn’t it? _Is_ it wonderful? Anne was four and shy as hell when the accident happened, the shit of year before- her daddy slipping and the screaming arguments Kate’d had with him, custody being taken away and Doug suddenly not being in her life and being too young to understand why, too young to understand why her mommy was crying because Kate was scared for Doug and scared for Anne and realizing how much a steady child support check helped out now that it was gone- messing her up, but Anne is almost eight now and thriving, picking up signing faster than she learned to speak, reaching the age where if she were fetal alcohol it would have been picked up, making friends and _happy_ in her school for deaf kids.

Plus, Kate still isn’t sure Goddard won’t put a bomb in her daughter’s head.

“I’ll have to talk to Anne,” she tells Marcus after a moment. “It’s a lot to think about, you know?”

Marcus’s voice is strained. “Of course. I will warn you, I’m going to be… taking a _work trip_ in a week. I can’t say for sure when we’ll be back, so I’ll need your answer within the next two days. How does that sound?”

“I’ll let you know, Marcus.”

A week later, Kate hasn’t called back.

Three months later, Doug comes back from the dead.


	2. Chapter 2

“Jesus Christ,” Mel says when she answers the phone. “I’m guessing you didn’t know your ex was in space?”

Kate rubs her forehead, torn about whether to be relived or not that her sponsor sounds as incredulous and disbelieving as she feels about this whole thing. “Fuck no, you would have heard about it if I knew. They said he pissed someone off in jail and got himself stabbed, which honestly sounds more like Doug than _going into fucking space_.” Kate takes a moment to be glad Anne is at school, hopes to god no one connects her last name with one of the people who crashed to Earth last night and this morning’s news that whatever they had in that ship had led to a raid on Goddard and several arrests for everything from breaking and entering to _terrorism_. Doug’s name had been leaked to the press around 4am.

It had been a hell of a sleepless night.

“Christ,” Mel says again. “What are you going to do?”

Kate sighs deeply. “I don’t have a clue. They don’t say where Doug is, if they arrested him too or whatever. I don’t know if I should reach out to someone, or if I should tell Anne, or— or— alert someone he’s supposed to be in prison and, oh yeah, dead!”

“Hey, it’s okay. Kate, take a deep breath.” Mel soothes her. “Are you at home? Do you have to go into work?”

Taking a deep breath, Kate does her best to slow her heartbeat. “No, I’m— I mean, yeah, I’m at home, but I don’t have work today.”

“I’m coming over.”

Mel is as good as her word, knocking on the door half an hour later with two cups of coffee in hand. 

“Thanks,” Kate says as one is handed to her, taking a sip and sitting down on the couch in exhaustion. “I didn’t sleep at all.”

“No kidding. Not every day you see your kid’s dead dad walk out of a spaceship he crashed into a golf course in Florida.”

“I thought for sure it was just… someone who looks like him.” She says, “ _He_ didn’t even look like him. He looked…” She trails off, thinking of the image, taken on a cell phone by some poor golf course groundskeeper, of the man who stepped out of the Goddard spaceship, who was apparently Doug, skinnier than she’d ever seen him, skin tinted grey and tired eyes, a gun in one shaky hand and the other sticking out of a sling. “He looked bad. Worse than I’ve ever seen him, and that’s saying something, you know?”

“I know.” Says Mel, who still has a scar on her lip from biting through it when she had seized during DTs, who’s nursed people through heroin withdrawal when their emaciated bodies looked like the living dead. Doug hadn’t necessarily looked worse than that, but he hadn’t looked much better.

Kate rubs her hands over her face, letting out a laugh that sounds more tired than she thinks is fair. “He was supposed to be gone, you know? I didn’t want him dead, not really, but it was almost a relief when he was. At least that way I didn’t have to decide whether, one day, I should let him see Anne, or cut him out forever. I didn’t have to worry about hating him or forgiving him because it was all pointless, anyways. And now— fuck, this explains why Goddard wanted to pay for Anne’s stuff.”

“I’m really fucking glad you never took them up on the offer to put those implants in Anne, Kate.”

“No shit. Fuck, I knew something was fucked up about that place, but— terrorism? What the fuck, Mel?” She exclaimed. “Goddard is capitalist NASA with a side of Apple, why were they doing… all of _that_?” Kate rubs her hands over her face. “Fuck, I want a drink. I want a joint.”

Mel gives her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder, picks up the mostly empty pack of smokes on the table, and hands it to her.

.

Mel picks Anne up from school at lunch, Kate too shaky with nerves to drive and too afraid someone would connect Anne with the astronauts as more and more information is released every hour to leave her at school. That shouldn’t be how she finds out.

Three dead people, a man with no paper trail, and a woman with far too long a paper trail for her apparent age gave a golf course a new sandpit with their stolen ship and were immediately put in quarantine.

Kate doesn’t know what to do.

She’s pretty sure she’d still be Doug’s emergency contact, next of kin, whatever— since they’ve ID’d him, they’ll have her info. In theory, they’ll call her, if she just waits. But how long will that take? What if Doug refuses to let them contact her, afraid of consequences and avoiding difficult situations like he always has been?

Kate had loved that about him, once: how he was able to twist out of everything, quick wits and nonsense babble, likeable even when drunk off his ass on whiskey he’d stolen from you. It was a fun trait when they were happy, the fucking most annoying thing ever when they wanted nothing more than to tear each other apart. You can’t have a functional relationship of any kind when you both drink like fishes, but beyond that you can’t have a relationship when one of you is too afraid to fucking _talk_ about anything without hiding behind two separate masks and more pop culture references than you could shake a stick at. She wasn’t great at talking, either, she never claimed otherwise, but after sobering up she did a lot of work with Mel to say things. 

There’s something uniquely maddening about loving an addict, even when they’re sober— a sober addict is still an addict, something Kate knows about herself as much as she knew— knows— about Doug, and there’s nothing so upsetting as watching them trick themselves into thinking they’re going to be able to stop themselves from falling back into their habit. Nothing so brutal as following a dried-out drunk’s eyes to the liquor aisle, the covetous angle of their lips and knowing they might talk themselves out of it this time, and maybe the next, and the next, but being able to see them at the top of a sheet of ice waiting for one false move to slip.

And when they do slip, fall headfirst into a relapse, there’s nothing so hard as knowing you weren’t enough to hold them up. Nothing so hard, except maybe knowing you never could have.

.

Kate had given Doug his one year cake, the both of them sleep deprived from having a six month old, stressed to all hell with the medical bills from the birth and the infection Kate came away with, bouncing back and forth between talking to their parents and swearing they were out of their lives Forever, Now, Officially, and they were incandescently happy— not together anymore, but partners in something much more important than sex or romance.

“Hi, I’m Kate, and I’m an alcoholic,” she begins to the mumbled _hi Kate_. “So, I met Doug when we were… fourteen? Both hiding out from our parents- there was this field behind our street, when we were young, or parking lot a bunch of grass decided was its now, anyways. I don’t know how we never met before then. But that day we did, and we ended up mixing my dad’s rum and his mom’s schnapps in this old-ass water bottle. It was the most disgusting thing ever, but it got the job done.

“We got together because we liked that we had someone who shared so much of our shit with. We stayed together because we wanted to keep shovelling more shit on each other. But then our beautiful daughter came, and it was like— everything came into focus. Doug, we were bad at being together, but we’re pretty good at this partner thing. You’re a great friend, an amazing partner, and the best dad I could hope Anne could have. Whenever I need you, or she needs you- we need you- you’re there with ice cream, or diapers, or that creepy lullaby she only likes when you sing. Thank you for being such a great dad, and always being here.”

Of the mountain of hurts Doug’d caused when he slipped, leaving Kate alone was one of the worst.

.

Kate decides before Mel gets back with Anne: she isn’t gonna say anything to Anne about her dad until there’s some solid confirmation that this isn’t the most ridiculous, unlikely identity mix-up of all time.

“Kate…” Mel begins when she tells her, the both of them crammed in the kitchen making grilled cheese while Anne’s distracted by the TV. She knows something is wrong— there’s no reason Kate would let her watch TV instead of going to school unless something was happening.

“Listen,” she cuts her off, trying to flip the grilled cheese. “Just imagine you get told your dead dad is alive, and was actually in space all this time you thought he was dead, even though he was supposed to be in jail if he was alive because he kidnapped you and got in a crash, but he’s back now, and then getting told ‘whoops he’s still dead, this is his identical twin Stevie, they were separated at birth!’”

“What are the chances Doug has— had?— has a secret twin brother who’s an astronaut, do you think?” Mel muses.

“Probably better than Doug faking his death from jail and becoming an astronaut, so my hesitating is reasonable.”

Mel sighs. “Fair point. Alright, what are you going to tell her until then? She was asking if anyone was dead on the way back, she knows somethings wrong. Anne’s a smart kid.”

“Yeah, she sure is,” Kate can feel her smile is unsteady on her face as she peers out of the kitchen towards Anne. “I’m gonna tell her lunch is ready.”

.

When Doug died, it was a single, official and stiff phone call from the prison informing her of it— it’s how she knows she’s his next of kin, his emergency contact— and telling her where she could pick up his ashes.

She hadn’t had the time or money or, honestly, the desire to go drive out to the place that was holding his ashes for months; not until after Marcus Cutter showed up on her doorstep and fixed her money and time problems and she had a second to think about anything other than Anne and bills.

She went to get the stupid ashes. She cursed herself the whole drive out there and most of the way back, half for being a sentimental idiot, half for taking so goddamn long to get them. Kate had been half convinced they wouldn’t be there anymore, that there must be a time limit to how long they hold unclaimed remains— but they had been there, waiting for one Kate Garcia. She left with a cardboard box with a plastic baggy inside, full of Doug. It was heavy, but she expected that; her tío had been cremated when she was young and she remembers the weight of that, a whole human in a strange shaped vase, too young to have yet been taught what an urn was but moments away from a slap to the ear when she called it a vase, the angry, grieving correction from her mamá that it was an urn, _urna, Katie_.

Doug isn’t in an urn, when she gets his ashes, and he’s never put in one. Once Kate got home, she gets rid of the box and puts the plastic bag with the ashes in a metal lock box and hides it away in the back of the crawl space.

Doug’s parents don’t have a funeral. They’re too ashamed to admit their son, their disowned, alcoholic son had died in jail.

The shame of doing nothing for him eats at Kate’s insides, but she can’t bring herself to do anything about it, and then it’s been too long.

The ashes stay in the crawl space.

.

Kate gets the call in the evening, several days later. Anne has been asking careful questions, too smart for her age and seeing how frazzled her mother was.

“Uhm. Hi! Is this Kate Garcia?” The woman’s voice is awkward, someone unsure what to say and lacking confidence that the person they’re talking to will take it well. Kate is immediately on guard.

“Yeah, who is this?”

“I’m Hera, I’m— a friend? Of Offic- Doug’s. Doug Eiffel?”

Something in Kate’s stomach drops past her knees. She had known this was coming, would honestly much prefer this to having to reach out herself or make the decision not to, but god, she would have appreciated another day to try and settle her feelings about all of this. But she’s self aware enough to know she’d want one more day tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, too. “A friend? I would have expected someone from the government before that.”

“We asked them not to call you until we’d figured some things out. Sorry. I guess you’ve seen the news?”

An exhausted, semi-hysterical laugh bubbles up from Kate’s throat. “Hera, I haven’t seen anything _but_ the news since I saw my kid’s dead dad step off a crashed spaceship. It’s been a hell of a week. I have a lot of questions, and a lot of feelings, and I get there’s probably some NDA crap around all this shit, but can you at least tell me if Doug’s okay?”

There’s a pause, like Hera’s trying to come up with a tactful way to say something difficult. “He’s… a little injured, nothing that serious. But there was… an incident… and Offi- Doug isn’t… his memory- it got erased.”

“…what.” Kate asks.

“His memories were erased.” Hera repeats, then pauses and says suddenly, “My Commander wants to speak to you.” And the click of a changing line comes through.

“Ms. Garcia?” A new woman asks. “I’m Renee Minkowski, Doug’s Commander. If you have any questions, I can do my best to tell you what I can.”

Kate does her best not to say ‘…what’ again, and ends up saying, “Cool, cool, cool. What’s cracking?” And then tries not to immediately hang up.

Commander Minkowski breezes right past it like anyone who’d dealt with Doug for more than a week. This, more than anything, is proof it’s actually Doug. “I’m sorry we took this long to contact you. As Hera said, we were figuring some things out, but you have a right to know what’s going on.”

“Figuring out the… memory loss?”

“Yes. And, frankly, if you would even want to hear from him.”

Kate laughs in disbelief, the frustration and confusion and grief of the past week welling up and turning into anger. “Doug is the father of my daughter. We were together for over a decade. Even after we split, we were… look, whatever Doug and I are, whatever he’s done— and I assume you know about the accident, and this is about that— I get to decide how angry I am, or if I forgive him. But to do that I _need to know what’s going on_.”

There’s silence on the other line for a moment before Minkowski says, “That’s fair, Ms. Garcia. I’m sorry we took so long contacting you.”

 _God, grant me the serenity_ , Kate thought, letting out a slow breath. “Okay, so, now, please, tell me what the fuck you mean by ‘got his memory erased’. How much did Doug forget? What the hell happened?” She asked, fully aware she was probably going to hate whatever Minkowski told her.

And she did. She really, really hated the explanation. It did, however, answer the question of what the everliving fuck had been going on at Goddard to explain the raid and terrorism charges placed so soon after the crash.

After Minkowski was done with her explanation, she paused and said, “But it… _seems_ like his memory is returning. We think it’s because of…”

Kate waited for a bit before prompting, “Because…?”

“…because of the aliens.”

“What.”

In the background of the call, Kate heard someone say “oh my god.” Kate understood how that woman felt.


End file.
